Abstract
AbstractUnderstanding the consequences of habitat modification on wildlife communities is central to the development of conservation strategies. However, albeit male and female individuals of numerous species are known to exhibit differences in habitat use, sex‐specific responses to habitat modification remain little explored. Here, we used a landscape‐scale fragmentation experiment to assess, separately for males and females, the effects of fragmentation on the abundance of Carollia perspicillata and Rhinophylla pumilio, two widespread Neotropical frugivorous bats. We predicted that sex‐specific responses would arise from higher energetic requirements from pregnancy and lactation in females. Analyses were conducted independently for each season, and we further investigated the joint responses to local and landscape‐scale metrics of habitat quality, composition, and configuration. Although males and females responded similarly to a fragmentation gradient composed by continuous forest, fragment interiors, edges, and matrix habitats, we found marked differences between sexes in habitat use for at least one of the seasons. Whereas the sex ratio varied little in continuous forest and fragment interiors, females were found to be more abundant than males in edge and matrix habitats. This difference was more prominent in the dry season, the reproductive season of both species. For both species, abundance responses to local‐ and landscape‐scale predictors differed between sexes and again, differences were more pronounced in the dry season. The results suggest considerable sex‐mediated responses to forest disruption and degradation in tropical bats and complement our understanding of the impacts of fragmentation on tropical forest vertebrate communities.
Highlights
We investigated how the abundance of male and female bats of two of the most common Central Amazonian bats, Carollia perspicillata and Rhinophylla pumilio, differs along a disturbance gradient composed of continuous primary forest, fragment interiors, forest edges, and secondary forest matrix habitats
RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF LOCAL AND LANDSCAPE PREDICTORS.— Independently for each sex and season, we examined the relative importance of local vegetation structure and landscape-scale metrics in affecting species abundance at the five focal spatial scales using Poisson generalized linear mixed-effects models (GLMMs)
Carollia perspicillata displayed a peak in pregnancy at the middle of the dry season and a second, slightly lower peak in the wet season
Summary
The reproductive phenology of many tropical bats is strongly correlated with environmental conditions and resource availability (Ramos Pereira et al 2010, Durant et al 2013) Still, despite timing their life cycle to match periods of peak food availability, female bats may be constrained by the elevated energetic requirements associated with pregnancy and lactation, which might force them to alter their foraging time budgets and limit their habitat use to the most resource-rich areas (Lintott et al 2014). Like numerous other taxa, are affected by fragmentation and habitat degradation (Meyer et al 2016) Their responses have been found to be scale-sensitive, highly speciesand ensemble-specific and to vary according to seasonal variation in resource abundance (Cisneros et al 2015a, Arroyo-Rodrıguez et al 2016, Chambers et al 2016, Mendes et al 2016, Ferreira et al 2017, Rocha et al 2017a). No study has yet investigated how male and female bats differ in their responses to local and landscape-scale characteristics in fragmented landscapes
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